Boris Slutsky (1919-1986) was born in Slavyansk and grew up in Kharkov, the capital of the Soviet Ukraine at that time. In the mid-1930s he met Mikhail Kulchitsky, who became his close friend and constant poetic interlocutor. In autumn 1937 Slutskiy moved to Moscow and became a student of the Moscow Law Institute. It was the time of the height of the Great Terror. In his later memoirs he wrote: "Many teachers - entire departments - and many students - disappeared. Despite the specific atmosphere of the Institute, there was a literary circle headed by Osip Brik, the closest associate of Mayakovsky and one of the fathers of the Soviet avant-garde.
Two years later, Kulchitsky moved to Moscow: his friends decided to go to the Literary Institute to attend a seminar of Ilya Selvinsky, a former leader of the constructivist movement, who was sharply opposed to Brik and Mayakovsky. At the same time, Slutskiy attended a literary circle at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History (IFLI), the most progressive humanitarian institute in Moscow at the time. IFLI was founded in 1931 on the basis of the Moscow University and lasted only ten years. Pavel Kogan and David Samoilov, peers of Slutskiy, the leaders of the frontal poetic generation, studied there, and Pavel Ulitin, one of the most radical reformers of Russian prose, attended the senior course.
This prehistory not only shows that Slutsky was in the epicenter of poetic life in the late 1930s, but also allows a better understanding of his poetry. He perceives his pre-war biography as part of a collective myth, with which he was forever disconnected from the war. Many poets of young literary Moscow die in the early years of the war: IFLI star Pavel Kogan, talented poet Nikolai Mayorov, who studied at a parallel seminar at the Literary Institute and was a friend of Kulchitsky, and finally Kulchitsky himself.
Slutsky went through the war - first as an ordinary man, then as a political officer, was seriously wounded, underwent several operations and was able to return to systematic literature classes only in 1948. His military experience is evidenced by the documentary "Notes on the war", completed in 1946 and distributed in samizdat (they were admired by Ilya Ehrenburg, Slutsky's close interlocutor in the 1950s and 60s). This is a very concise, "business" prose, which records in detail all the circumstances of the war. In it you can find stories of many later verses.
Slutsky experienced the death of friends - and primarily Kulchitsky, considering him a true successor to the revolutionary avant-garde of the 1920s and even more talented poet than he himself. According to Slutskiy, the best young poets of the 1930s died in the war, but those who survived must realize what the departed did not have time to do. Behind this idea lies a central theme for the poet - the relationship between the individual and the collective, an insoluble conflict in which the survival of the entire society can be ensured by the sacrifice of a few, but its best representatives
A characteristic feature of Slutsky's manner is the repetition of similar phrases, an abundance of tautology and repetitions. Due to this method, the situation depicted in the poem, clear and even trivial at first glance, is gradually becoming less clear and understandable. If utopian Marxism taught the onset of a classless society in the future, Slutskiy reverses this picture: the utopia has already taken place in the past, in the 1920s, during the poet's youth, but this moment was missed. The "fire of the world revolution", which was supposed to ignite in the future, was in the past - all this was already in the 1920s and will never happen again. The final line - "We were all pioneers" - describes the fate of the entire generation: it was part of the utopian world, but the repression and war closed the way to it.
In the poem by Eduard Bagritsky, one of the most famous Soviet poets of the turn of the 1920s and 30s, close to the literary group of constructivists, there are such lines: "We were led by youth to a saber campaign, / We were thrown by youth on the Kronstadt ice. "Slutsky's We are genetically related to Bagritsky's We: it denotes active participants in the post-revolutionary period - those who were captured by the whirlwind of Soviet history. But Slutsky's story for these "we" is, in a sense, already over, and all their utopian expectations now refer not to the future, albeit as far away as they may be, but to the past, which appears unrealistic and almost mythical.